


Wormwood

by vyatka



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Ballet, F/M, Ghosts, Pagan Festivals, Shapeshifting, Underworld, Witches, happy halloween lads!, my writing makes me nauseous sometimes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-02
Updated: 2018-10-03
Packaged: 2019-07-23 08:00:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,985
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16154900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vyatka/pseuds/vyatka
Summary: Ghosts do not make love or celebrate it. This is just the truth about being a ghost.





	1. flesh for the queen

**Author's Note:**

> This is a prequel to [Asphodel](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13360263), but you do not need to have read it to understand or enjoy this fic.

The Beltane moon lounges high and yellow over the black water that splits the living world from the dead. On two sides of it, a dog and a witch face one another. 

The Beltane moon - who is one of two witnesses to what is happening - is still the Beltane moon, even if Beltane is over. Just like the dog - whose shaggy, shadowy mass is difficult to pick out against the foliage - is still the man Natasha loves, even if there is no speaking to him now. 

She tries anyway, her throat thick. One hand clutches the bird bones that rest below her collarbones. In the other is a knife, and the Beltane moon gives it a shine like a baby's laugh. 

"Don't," she says. " _Please._ " 

The dog has one upright ear. It pricks forward. For one singular instant, Natasha knows hope. 

Then, like the pendulum that ticks the hours over the ghost city, it flattens back, and crushes her hope with it. The dog shuffles his position. He hunkers to the ground. The growl carries even over the rush of the river. 

Shivering, Natasha lifts her knife. 

 *** 

**THREE DAYS EARLIER**

The Beltane moon is the lovemaking moon. It is supposed to be the lovemaking moon for the gods, but humans are good at nothing if not stealing for their deities, so it became the lovemaking moon for humans and gods alike. Beltane is for weddings, sex, conception, food and flowers and dancing and love and growth and life, the celebration of living in all its rich rawness. There is no better day to get married. It is also the best day to cut your hair; the legend, which is true, being that it will grow back twice as fast and twice as thick. 

The city of the dead, in the far, far north of Russia, clearly has no need for such a holiday. The ghosts who reach the city, usually after a journey through tombs and catacombs and cemeteries, barely have enough wit to remember their living names, much less what it was like to be rawly alive. Even the ones with an uncanny-strong cling to their living identities resent it. Ghosts do not make love or celebrate it. This is just the truth about being a ghost. 

Contrary to its name, the city of the dead is not  _all_ ghosts, and those who live there rather than haunt it are far from immune to the Beltane moon. 

To the great fanged dogs who guard the gates and herd the ghosts and hunt down the runaway souls in this country, Beltane is three of the eighteen annual days in which they are men. Which means, for the witch Natasha Romanoff, it is three of the eighteen annual days in which her lover can speak to her. 

Her hair is the only read thing in the ghost city. It announces her coming, and so do her feet. They have the lightness of a dancer of the Bolshoi, but the dead make no sound at all, so it is easy for him to hear her coming, she hopes. Even as a man, and he has been one for a day, his hearing is sharp. 

A good thing, too, because, as one of the other dogs has informed her, he's clawing his eyes out again, and so Natasha's visit has more purpose than love. She needs to replace them. This will be the fourteenth pair she's given him, and no matter how many times she tells him  _this is the last time, the last pair, I can't keep making you new eyes,_ within a few weeks he does it again.  _Rip off an ear next time,_ she said shortly, once.  _Those are easier to make._

Making body parts isn't even Natasha's trade. She's far from an engineer. It was only something she had some rough knowledge in, like scrying or calling storms out of the sky or archery. Natasha is a fine bowhunter. 

But Natasha, having been young, had made the mistake of impressing the dead queen with her ballet, and been all too eager to share her other skills when the queen leaned forward on her throne to inquire "And what else can you do, pretty living thing?" 

She will be dead before the queen lets her leave. That may be what bonded her to James in the first place. 

Now, she reaches the end of the hall and opens the door on the right. It is law never to open a left door here. 

"Hello," she says. He's illuminated from the side by the stark, leaching light of the city's only light source, a massive lightbulb suspended over the rickrack bars that make up its underground pseudo-skyline. For a moment, her heart leaps. Then he turns his face toward her. 

Oh. 

He's done more than scratch his eyes out, although he's done that, too. The red pits of his eyes, the red fall of her hair - the only spots of color as far as she can see. They're gruesome. The shock is lower, where the blood from his eyes has dripped, dried, and mingled with the blood on his cheeks. Where they are chewed through. His molars and gums are bare, and it almost looks like a skeletal grin. It looks as if he chewed as much of his cheeks as he could reach. His teeth glisten. 

He can't speak. He turns his mauled face in her direction and Natasha is pleased to see that his lips are intact. 

She kneels in front of him. Her hands find the back of his neck. Natasha kisses him, despite the fact that he is currently without the muscles to respond, and she pulls away, undoing the lock on her chest of miracles, and sets about fixing him. 

 ***

Natasha and him, technically, have two first meetings. The first, she doesn't remember. When she first came here - she followed the crow with the silver eye, just as she'd always known not to - all the city dogs looked the same. She can tell them apart now, and match them to their human selves. None of them could be mistaken for real dogs. They're too big, and too unnatural. The one who let her through the gates looked like no mortal animal, unmistakably Doberman but wrong. Natasha wasn't afraid. Predators usually take to her, as do most wild animals. James was somewhere among the others. 

The second, when she met him as a man, was on October thirty-first. 

Unlike Beltane, the dead do have cause to celebrate Samhain. The one time a year when ghosts snap out of their stupor, and the city empties as though it's evacuating for a storm. Only the queen and her dogs remain. 

"Dance me something," the queen implored Natasha. "Beautiful thing. Beautiful living girl. Dance me something new, and make it lovely. Put on your red shoes." 

Natasha touched the bird bones around her neck. They were her only jewelry. The queen regularly gave her gold and emeralds and pearls for her dancing, and once a blue ruby the size of a child's fist, and yet Natasha was smart enough not to wear any of it.  "I have nothing new to dance, my queen," she said, although she did sit to lace on her red pointe shoes. The queen gave her clothes and shoes, too. The only thing Natasha wore was her dancing outfit, worn silk and tattered tulle. 

Rules of the underworld.

The queen drummed her long, long fingernails. "Nothing?" 

"I've danced you ever dance I know," she said patiently. "I could draft something new, madame, but it won't be ready by today." What she doesn't add is that the queen has kept her so busy that she's barely had time to scavenge for food, much less to compose ballet. 

The queen groans. "Call one of the dogs, then," she said. 

There were none just around. Natasha scanned for one. There was only her, the queen, a drifting cobweb of a ghost with nowhere to go on the one day it could, and a man with a gleaming metalwork arm at the back of the court. 

Her eye skipped over him at first, assuming a ghost. The stronger ones could look almost corporeal, especially on or near the sabbats, and if they had the presence of mind, they could look however they wanted. 

"You," called the queen. "Dance with her." 

He lifted his head, standing - the sound of his feet on marble marked him living - and emerged obediently from the shadows. 

The queen drummed her fingernails. 

His replaced arm was iron and gold, which made it someone else's handiwork. He was tall enough that Natasha, of modest height, had to look up at him, although he kept his shoulders rolled, as if to downplay it. It had the unintended effect of highlighting their breadth. His hair was long and dark. His eyes were colorless, but she suspected that in a light that allowed for color, they would have been blue. 

Perhaps it was the fact that he was quiet and handsome, and Natasha had few and dismal experiences meeting living men, or else she was just thrilled to share the status of not-dead with another person. She liked him immediately. 

He looked at her. Natasha pictured herself through his eyes (tattered, human, tangled, ginger, unbeloved) and wondered if his opinion of her was as favorable as hers of him. It was. He perked. 

They stood there, shyly regarding one another, until the queen moaned. "Oh,  _love,_ " she said, and waved her hand. "Dance." 

They did. 

Natasha found herself spry for the first time in weeks. Her heart pumped. She used it as rhythm. His hands held her waist lightly, and they made it up together. It shouldn't have worked. It did anyway. He was strong and agile, and quick to catch onto her cues, which left her and her red hair free to lead. They moved like caracals. He lifted her; she bit back a grin. 

Her joy manifested as flowers. 

Balanced on her toe, bleeding, she spun, sweating lightly, and flowers emerged from her feet. She almost faltered, realized what was happening, and spun faster. Magic. She sprayed roses across the court. The queen gasped, delighted. When they finally tilted to a stop, she was applauding. 

Natasha panted a little, beaming. She had alighted en pointe, and dropped down to her normal height to look at him. It changed the angle of his face. He was almost more handsome for it. She stared at him with hunger and wonder, and he looked at her the same way. It wasn't just that he was living, although that was a significant part of it. She couldn't name it. 

He would be hurt, briefly, by the possibility that she only wanted him because he was alive, as if there was a lower qualifier. The way she kissed him later, with a pleased sigh, reassured him. They still had yet to speak to one another. She marveled at how warm he was, hot flesh under her hands. Blood. A beating heart. Natasha slipped her hand inside of his shirt - he shivered - and over his living, beating, nervous, beating heart. Her eyes pricked. Even as a child, she had never been exposed to another person's living heart. Wolves and livestock had educated her to the mechanics of the mammal body. She had examined hearts up close, and given them as gifts to bypassing gods, coolly removed from their functions as organs of life, but she had never put her hand on anyone's chest to feel the proof. 

He bent down slowly and kissed her again. It was her turn to shiver. Her hand still rested on his chest, and she moved it slightly to find his nipple, toying with it on instinct (he was so warm and pleasant) and her other hand busied itself with the fabric. She wanted it off. 

"I don't know your name," he said. His voice was not as deep as she had expected. It wasn't disappointing. She thought it would make for nice singing. 

"Natalia," she told him. Politely: "Yours?" 

He shrugged. "I never remember." 

"It's not so important." She barely remembered her own sometimes. She smoothed her hands over his shoulders, the powerful expanse of them. She was just tall enough that she could rise onto her toes and place her lips on his clavicle, and just short enough to be embittered that she couldn't reach his neck and gauge how tender he was just behind his ear, or at the corner of his jaw. 

When she pulled back, he cocked his head. "You? You aren't dead, and you aren't a dog." 

"Neither are you?" She frowned. 

"Yes I am," he said, and that was how she found out about the dogs, and about him. Physical curiosity replaced itself with the more innocent kind. He told her what he could. Like her, he had incomplete knowledge of his origin and circumstance. She curled her knees up to her chin, childlike, and listened. The queen had never mentioned that her dogs were  _people._

 "Can you change yourself?" Natasha had to know. "Can you go from human to dog and back on your own?" She wondered what he looked like as a dog.

He seemed pleased to be asked questions. "Yes. No," he said. "It's - it's easier to go from man to dog. But when I'm the dog, it's harder to go back." 

"Oh. Why?" 

He furrowed his brow. "When I am the dog, it's not the same. I don't think the same. I might become the dog with the intent to change back, and the dog just forgets. It's - I mean, my mind doesn't work right. I've done it before. It's just hard." His pretty eyes roved over her, slow. "I've seen you a lot." 

Natasha nodded. 

"I thought you were another dog, at first. But you're not." 

"No," Natasha agreed. "Although I  _was_ raised by wolves." 

The corner of his mouth quirked up. "What are you here for? You're not meant for this place." 

If his function was to shepherd ghosts, then what was hers? Natasha looked at him through a mat of her hair. 

"I dance," she said. "And I make flesh for the queen." 


	2. under bleaching light

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is some smut in this chapter, but it is very light - I didn't think it was enough to warrant an explicit rating.

She fixes his cheeks first. Face muscles are uncomplicated, mostly long and flat and easy to tie in. She packs skin around them like a fine layer of clay. From there it's just setting the hair follicles, a boring and painstaking process that follows the dull rhythm of poke, jab, poke, jab, poke, jab. It's not especially fun, particularly since he can't talk to her to pass the time. He tried; it resulted in a gurgle and saliva leaking through his molars. 

Natasha finishes the first, and then the second. "Hold still," she instructs unnecessarily, holding it up to check stubble and color match. 

They attach easily. His new eyes will be easier. 

"Poor thing." Luckily the lids aren't as damaged as they look. The blood lends the impression of larger rips than there are. With the hem of her skirt, spat on, she dabs gently at tender skin. 

"Ah," he says, wincing. 

"You did this to yourself." But her hands are careful. She mends the tiny fractures in the tissue. They'll shape around the eyeballs as soon as she pops them in. "Here they are." Still wet from their protective casing, she presses them into his hand. 

They roll like gerbils on a wheel when first inserted, as if frustrated at being confined to sockets. He has to blink, tear ducts releasing, so that is how he looks at her the moment he can: tear-stained and healed and grateful. 

"Thank you," he rasps. 

"You're an idiot to tear them out like that. Don't you respect my work?" 

"Yes." He licks his lips. 

It's Beltane. They both know it. His new cheeks are flushing slightly He probably doesn't want to be presumptuous, even now, which is sweet of him, and frustrating, as though she doesn't build up a quiver of excitement in the weeks before he becomes a person. 

By now she has learned that the soft, thin skin behind his ear is in fact as sensitive as she'd once suspected. Natasha climbs into his lap, lifting her skirt just enough that when she drops it, it flows over his thighs and pools, bunching, at his navel. As always, she delights at the sheer flesh-and-blood heat of him. 

"I missed you," she says. She leans forward. He moves to kiss her, but she dodges his lips and finds the corner of his jaw instead, and the spot where his jaw becomes his neck, and further back, the spot that makes him shiver and laugh. "Don't be ticklish!" 

His chest shakes against her in a disobedient giggle. "I missed  _you._ So much." 

"You saw me all the time." Her mouth right against his ear, she barely has to vocalize. She folds her arms around his neck. 

"You know it's not the same." 

"I don't want to think about that." Half-closed, her eyes reflect bursts of light back at her. "I want you to fuck me." Tauntingly she nibbles his earlobe. "Please." Her hips roll, unsubtle. There he is, underneath her. She can  _feel_ him. "I'm so glad you're not a ghost," she adds, as her hips take up a rhythm. 

He makes an agreeing noise. 

She might love him. And not just because he's the only living thing she's spoken to in a long time. She might be in love with his mouth (it isn't half-bad at kissing  _her_ neck, or any other part of her - her wrists, her  _lips,_ her breasts, tender in the perpetually cold air, her belly, her hips) and his shoulders (they push her legs apart) and his fingers (both the flesh and the iron) and his eyes 

\- (well, she made them) 

looking coyly up at her from beneath the fringe of his lashes, and his fingers (oh) and his hair (she twists her fingers in it) and his mouth and his fingers, 

and his  _cock_ - 

 

And his heart, she thinks, draped over the smooth warmth of his chest like a lizard sunning herself on a rock, feeling it beat. She understand why babies find heartbeats so comforting. 

If anyone were to talk in on them, they'd see the witch and the man, lying bare chest to bare chest. Natasha's hair is long and wild enough to cover a measure of her arms nad back. Her head crowns just underneath his chin. His iron fingers are twined in hers, and his organic ones strong along the channel of her back. In another, better world, the light streaming through the window would be golden sunlight, instead of bleaching and unkind. 

Even under bleaching light in the belowground city of ghosts, though, bliss can live. Natasha is blissed. He is, too. 

 ***

"We should run away," he says. 

Now they're sitting up, still naked, eating on the bed. Natasha had the foresight to bring pancakes, which they rip apart with their hands and eat plain for want of silverware or condiments. When he says it, she hardens. "Don't say that. She'll hear you." 

"Not now." 

"The queen has a thousand eyes," she says without hyperbole. Since he's right - there are no silver-eyed animals nearby just now - she drops her voice. "And there's nowhere we could go, anyway." 

"We could go anywhere. All we would have to do is get out of the country. The queen doesn't leave the city." 

Natasha is incredulous. "You don't think she would send the dogs after you? The others? They know your scent well enough to track you out of Russia. Don't be stupid, James." 

"We don't leave Russia." 

He's almost a child sometimes. "I think they might make an exception if one of them betrayed the queen." 

"How would leaving her betray her?" He argues. A lock of brown-black hair falls over his eyes, reminiscent of the dog's one cocked ear. Her heart aches. Regardless of whether she should notice his beauty mid-argument, she can't help it. She's a helpless moth in love. 

In love with a fool. Or else he's just being stubborn. 

"You're not wrong. But you know that's not how she'll see it."  _Don't you think I've wanted to escape?_ She doesn't say, biting her tongue. As if she hasn't schemed a dozen ways to climb to the surface and escape the unholy vastness of this country before the ghost queen or her dogs or her spies could find her. She even schemed a plan that would have worked, if anyone from her home knew where she had gone. Her heart abruptly switches from aching over his sweet handsome face to panging over where she'd come from, the little town eternally trapped in the golden hour just before sunset. Everything was red there. Natasha's hair was just a blip in the landscape of that lovely little place, where red dust settled on red wood carved from the red trees that the red birds roosted in. 

What she wouldn't give to see the sun again, or, better yet, the moon. 

The moon would be up now, she thinks wistfully, and luckier people are having sex and dancing underneath it, instead of having sex and hatching furtive escape plans. 

Except they aren't hatching any plans. They can't escape. Natasha, as she almost always is, is right. Even if they could somehow beat the other dogs out of Russia, and even if the dogs wouldn't pursue them beyond, they would never be sure of outrunning the queen's spies. They would never be able to shake the unforgiving silver gaze, and it would be no kind of life to live like that. Observed, chased. 

"I know." He hasn't subsided. "I have an idea, Tasha." 

She picks up his hand, gives it a kiss. "Do we need to talk about this? Please. We have so little time together." 

He kisses hers back, revenge. "You'd have to die for it to work." 

"Hmm. I don't like plans where I die." 

" _Temporarily._ You'd have to be a ghost. It's the only way you would get out." 

Natasha has an idea where he's going. Her eyebrows make twin quirks, questioning. 

"I would have to kill you," he continues, the skin around his eyes tightening minutely. "It would have to look like I was - like you were trying to escape, and I had to stop you. And once you were a ghost, you could run away. I'd follow you." 

"Then what? We live together, a ghost and a dog? You know too much about ghosts to think that would work. I would lose myself within a year. Is that what you want to see me become? A whisper of wind who can't stop repeating her own name?" 

"No," he says, hurt. "No. Never. How could you think I would want that for you? No," he says. "Before you died, you could make all the peaces of yourself. 

She. 

"Your hands. Your eyes. Your head, your ears, your skull. All the parts of you, inside and out. You make them before you die, and once you're a ghost, you attach them all together, and that's your new body. You're alive again. 

Natasha swallows. 

"If anyone could do it, you could. You'd be such a strong ghost." Damn him twice, he's so earnest she can't even be indignant. "And you wouldn't have to be one for long." 

He would have to kill her. Her hands fly to her throat, imagining it torn out. His teeth in the soft slope of her neck, not teasing or tickling but crushing and killing. 

She still hasn't said anything, and he fidgets. "I know it's not fair," he says lamely. 

"I don't want to die," she whispers. A bird hops along the windowsill. 

She detects a flicker of disappointment behind his pupils, but thinks it's probably directed at himself, not at her. His anger and his self-loathing look different. This is the latter. 

"You're right," he says. "I'm sorry." 

Natasha nods. "But I'll do it." 

 ***

**TWO DAYS LATER**

 

No one could replicate Natasha's body like herself. She knows her own muscles and bones. She even bothers to make her hair, which she's never done before, other than the occasional stubble or leg hair. Her own mane is an entirely different animal. She plucks a strand of it and then multiplies it, attaching each one to the scalp that will be hers, and then presses eyelashes into her future eyelids. 

(Natasha is not conceited, but neither is she immune to the occasional flash of whimsical vanity, and she'll admit she gave herself longer, darker lashes than were strictly necessary.) 

Even on Beltane, Natasha and James can only risk spending so much time together. She sees him only a few times. 

If his plan works - and the more she thinks about it, the more she dares to believe it might - they'll be more than able to make up for lost time. 

They'd have bought some more, at least. The queen would think Natasha a renegade ghost. It might be a year before she grows suspicious. And then? Natasha is a witch. She can figure something out. 

She looks over her handmade self. 

"I've never made a whole person before," she tells it, wry. She folds its knees to its chest, wraps its arms around them, bows its head, and places it quietly into a sack. Strange to think that that's the body she'll be in before long. 

Her throat tingles. She strokes it absently, a habit that's sprung up within the last few hours. 

"Lovely girl," the queen told her earlier today, taking her face in her ice-cold hands. "Where are you? Gone, gone away, off inside your head." It made Natasha's blood chill. 

Outside, aboveground, she knows that night is falling. She slings the sack of herself over her shoulder and sets off barefoot through the city. The dogs are accustomed enough to seeing her laden with meat-parts that they won't stop her. The only one she passes is half-asleep, anyway, one foot swinging slowly back and forth like a cat's tail. 

"Three days as a human, and that's all your doing?" She huffs, adjusting her sore shoulder. "Dogs." 

She reaches the gates. 

Vaguely she recognizes the female standing near it, blonde and arrogant. She doesn't deign to look at Natasha for too long. She takes her in a cursory glance, eyeing her cargo, and opens her mouth to ask what she's doing. 

"Just going to the surface." Natasha jerks her thumb. He has slunk out of the shadows behind her, his one upright ear almost laid to the side in boredom. She tries to meet his eyes. "He's coming with me." 

The woman's mouth sets itself on the precipice of a leer, the implication filthy. 

 _I wish,_ Natasha thinks. 

The city gates swing open. Natasha's breath has never been as shallow as when she walks through them. 

The ascent up the staircase is long and lightless. The stars don't reach down here. 

"I hope this works," she tells him. "I'm nervous." 

He trots ahead of her, taking the steps in big bounding strides. Bastard. It leaves Natasha alone in the pitch blackness, and she has to feel her way up, infuriatingly slow. Her heart starts to pound. 

At least she has a knife. She draws it out and fondles its tiny handle. She will not tremble. It's just the darkness. It unnerves her. Bastardly of James to leave her alone in it. Maybe he's overly excited.  _She_ just wants to get it over with. 

Slowly, moonlight starts to filter in. She must be halfway up. 

The stairs are settled with a fine layer of dust. The dogs must have done much ghost-wrangling within the last few weeks. Maybe no one dies in the spring. 

She frowns. 

Stair after stair, the dust is undisturbed. James had burst ahead of her, and yet there's not a single pawprint. 

"James?" 

She picks up her pace, darting upward, and leaps over the last step, and the imagery must be something like a demon clawing out of hell. She inhales. 

 _Air._ Nighttime air, real and fresh, even if it is tainted by the murk of the river, the city's water source and moat. 

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees his head. His foreleg glints. His eyes flash silver. He - 

His eyes flashed silver. 

Like the eyes of the little bird hopping on the windowsill. And the crow she'd followed out of her safe, woodsy village. Out here in the air, on the surface, nothing is naturally silver. It's an inhuman color. 

Which means, "She's got you," Natasha gasps, and thrusts herself forward. He lunges. She shoves her stride larger than it can properly go. Her hamstrings shriek. Her bare heel hits a rock, hard, and she pushes forward. 

The queen has a thousand eyes, she warned him. She  _warned him._ She warned him. 

He crashes into her, his eyes that unnatural, dead silver, and his teeth snap for her throat, and would have caught it did she not claw upward, holding his head at bay. 

"No, no, no - " She's shouting. "James, James - " 

Natasha's knife bites into his neck. He yelps. She jams it full force into the cogs of his metal foreleg, pushes out from under him and runs into the river. It's shallow but fast, threatening to rip her legs out from under her.  _The queen can't cross it. She can't._

Wet, shaking on the banks. "Don't. Please." 

The disturbed workings of his leg buzz and tick, trying to fix themselves. His growl carries over the water. Muscles bunch. Whether the queen can cross it or not, she - he - intends to try. 

Natasha lifts her knife. 

She doesn't want to know. 

She heaves it into the night, turns in the wet sand, and bolts. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Unfortunately, you can tell I ran out of steam on this fic towards the end. I still like it. 
> 
> Feel free to read [Asphodel](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13360263) if you enjoyed this one!
> 
> I'm also on [Tumblr](http://soldatka.tumblr.com/).


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